Box 15 - International Tangier

Ali Tayar

Ali Tayar, who ran a New York-based architecture firm
until his death, created some of the world’s most beautiful
interiors, layering luxurious details onto standardized,
Erector-set-like parts. He completed projects for the likes of USM and Michael Maharam of Maharam;
what the two companies had in common, he said, was that they had been
doing one thing well for generations. An affinity for high standards—and
for those who followed them—pervaded Tayar’s work. Born in Turkey and
educated in Europe (and later at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology), Tayar was old-school, a gentleman at home in myriad
languages and cultures, with a distaste for anything trendy, flimsy, or
ostentatious.

But Tayar was hardly backward-looking. He was fascinated by the
idea of mass production, which for much of the 20th century promised to
revolutionize design. Though his own projects were one-offs, tailored to
the needs of loyal and discerning clients, he focused on
standardization, he said, as a way of editing his work. In an era where
every “nutty” shape was possible, Tayar said, he searched for and
depended on limiting principles.

His projects included a hotel in Bern, Switzerland,
and another in Zermatt, where his “kit” of metal and plywood parts
formed an extraordinarily luxurious backdrop for another Tayar passion,
Danish modern furniture, and a house near Bern with a carbon-fiber living room.
“There’s no difference between structure and surface,” Tayar said of
how the room was made. “It’s like the hull of a boat.” The room, reduced
in size, could have passed through an airport metal
detector; Tayar liked challenging himself by thinking up rules, then
sticking to them. His approach could be expensive, but it was the
opposite of excessive. He was a researcher as much as a designer.

Ellen Levy, a friend and a repeat client, remembers that he was
never separated from his sketchbook. “He drew exquisitely,” she says, in
a quest to find ways that standardization could give rise to beauty.
“On the one hand, he was so rational, wedded to engineering principal.
On the other hand, he was so poetic. He thought like an artist. This mix
of poetry and rationalism gave his work a great lightness of spirit.”

Born in Istanbul in 1959, Tayar studied architecture at the
University of Stuttgart and at MIT. In 1993, he began practicing in New
York, where he quickly became known as the designer of homes and
commercial spaces (including Pop Burger and Pop Pizza locations) and for
the furniture and storage systems he devised for them. His work found
its way into shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt
Smithsonian Design Museum.

In 2002, he was chosen as one of the Emerging Voices of the
Architectural League of New York. He gave a talk about Fritz Haller, the
Swiss architect known for factory-made buildings and the
beloved USM Haller storage system. Tayar described Haller as an
important link between Jean Prouvé (the prewar proponent of
mass-produced buildings) and the later “high-tech” architects Richard
Rogers, Renzo Piano, and Norman Foster. A USM employee heard the talk,
and soon Tayar was on a plane to Switzerland to meet the company’s
executives. They hired him to design a line of tables as well as
the Omnia hotel in Zermatt. USM’s president also had Tayar design
several residences, even fabricating Tayar-designed components
in USM factories. The president was, Tayar said, “open to the idea of
systems like no client was ever going to be. It was a bit like answered
prayers.”

Tayar was philosophical about the gap between what mass
production could have achieved (affordable housing for millions) and his
one-of-a-kind creations. But he believed the ideas he developed for his
clients might someday find wide application. “After architects have
made every nutty shape,” he said, “they’re going to want to start to
edit.” And when they do, they may take a close look at how Tayar’s ways
of editing produced such spectacular results. (Source [accessed 23 May 2017]: http://www.interiordesign.net/articles/11585-ali-tayar-new-york-based-architect-and-designer-dies-at-57/, written by Fred A. Bernstein)

At the behest of his estate, Ali Tayar's papers were donated to the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT. Selections from the Ali Tayar Archive are included here, with more
to come. The entire archive is available to students, faculty,
researchers, and scholars at the Aga Khan Documentation Center.